People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky

PEOPLE POWER

PEOPLE POWER

Edited by

Aaron Schutz and Mike Miller

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville

Copyright for the reprinted selections resides with the author, agent, or original publisher. For more information, see the credit that accompanies each selection.

© 2015 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2015

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2014012672

LC classification number HN90.C64P46 2014

Dewey class number 303.30973—dc23

ISBN 978-0-8265-2041-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2042-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2043-2 (ebook)

To my wife, Jessica,

and my daughters, Hiwot and Sheta.

—Aaron Schutz

To all those

who have invested themselves

in the art/craft/science of organizing

as a way to fight for social and economic justice

and make democracy a living reality.

And to the memory of Herb White,

organizer extraordinaire.

—Mike Miller

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Why Is Alinsky Important Today?

—Mike Miller

Part I: Introduction

1. Editors’ Introduction

—Mike Miller and Aaron Schutz

2. Saul Alinsky and His Core Concepts

—Mike Miller

3. What Is an Organizer? (1973)

—Richard Rothstein

Part II: Alinsky’s Colleagues

Section A: Nicholas von Hoffman: The Woodlawn Organization and the Civil Rights Movement in the North

4. An Introduction to Nicholas von Hoffman

—Aaron Schutz

5. The Woodlawn Organization: Assorted Essays (1961–1969)

—Various Authors

6. Questions and Answers (1959)

—Saul Alinsky, Nicholas von Hoffman, and Lester Hunt

7. Finding and Making Leaders (1963)

—Nicholas von Hoffman

Section B: Fred Ross: Organizing Mexican Americans in the West

8. Fred Ross and the House-Meeting Approach

—Various Authors

9. Cesar Chavez and the Fate of Farmworker Organizing

—Mike Miller

10. Dolores Huerta and Gil Padilla

—Various Authors

Section C: Tom Gaudette and His Legacy

11. Tom Gaudette: An Oral History

—Various Speakers

12. Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta

—Various Authors

13. What Every Community Organization Should Know about Community Development (1975)

—Stan Holt

14. John Baumann and the PICO National Network

—Interviewed by Mike Miller

Section D: Dick Harmon

15. An Introduction to Dick Harmon

—Various Authors

16. Making an Offer We Can’t Refuse (1973)

—Dick Harmon

Section E: Ed Chambers and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

17. Ed Chambers: The IAF Institute and the Post-Alinsky IAF

—Mike Miller

18. Organizing for Family and Congregation (1978)

—Industrial Areas Foundation

19. Relationship and Power: An Interview with Ernesto Cortes Jr. (1993)

—Noëlle McAfee

20. A Call for Organizing, Confrontation, and Community Building (1995)

—Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood

21. Standing for the Whole (1990)

—Industrial Areas Foundation

Part III: Different Directions

Section A: Heather Booth, Midwest Academy, and Citizen Action

22. An Introduction to Heather Booth, the Midwest Academy, and Citizen Action

—Aaron Schutz, with commentary by Mike Miller

23. Direct Action Organizing: A Handbook for Women: Chapter 1 (1974)

—Heather Booth

Section B: Wade Rathke and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

24. An Introduction to Wade Rathke and ACORN

—Aaron Schutz

25. ACORN Community Organizing Model (1973)

—Wade Rathke

26. The Story of an ACORN Organizer: Madeline Talbott

—Interviewed by Mike Miller

Part IV: Concluding Commentaries

27. The State of Organizing

—Mike Miller

28. Thinking beyond the Present

—Aaron Schutz

Index

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for reading and commenting on portions of the book, being interviewed by us, and otherwise helping move this book to completion: Frank Bardacke, John Baumann, Heather Booth, Luke Bretherton, Molly Corbett, Don Elmer, Ken Galdston, John Gaudette, Michael Gecan, Arnie Graf, Stephanie Gut, Dick Harmon, Stan Holt, Lester Hunt, Bud Kanitz, Gretchen Laue, Spence Limbocker, Richard March, Craig Merrilees, Mary Ochs, Gilbert Padilla, Bill Pastreich, Gregory Pierce, Frank Pierson, Karen Ramos, Miles Rapoport, Wade Rathke, Fred Ross Jr., Danny Schechter, Ed Shurna, Tom Sinclair, Margery Tabankin, Madeline Talbott, Gabriel Thompson, Nicholas von Hoffman, Michael Westgate, and Herb White. Thank you to all the authors, estates, and owners of the included texts for permission to reprint them, including many of the individuals named above, as well as Noëlle McAfee, Presbyterians Today, Johnny Ray Youngblood, and Kathy Trapp. Without their participation, this book could not have been completed.

In addition to the wonderful University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee interlibrary loan department staff, who went beyond the call of duty in accessing many materials, we would like to thank the archives of the following institutions: the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Chicago History Museum, DePaul University, East Tennessee State University, the Highlander Center, Loyola University-Marymount, the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Farmworker Movement Documentation Project website (farmworkermovement.com), put together by LeRoy Chatfield, was invaluable for the Fred Ross section.

We apologize if we have missed anyone who assisted us with this effort.

Aaron would like also to thank his family: his wife, Jessica, who put up with numerous long and loud phone discussions with Mike, and his daughters, Hiwot and Sheta, always annoyed at the time their father spends on his computer.

While thanks are due, the final responsibility for what has been done with these contributions rests with us.

Preface

Why Is Alinsky Important Today?

MIKE MILLER

Millions of people demonstrated in Egypt and toppled a dictator. But the people responsible for that mobilization were unable to elect a government to fill the vacancy. A careful analysis of people power in the country would have made the outcome predictable. When the elected president exceeded the military’s definition of what was acceptable, it dumped him. A careful analysis of the power structure of the country would have made this outcome predictable as well. I think the organizers of the liberation struggle in Egypt would benefit from a reading of Saul Alinsky.

Occupy Wall Street lifted up the vast economic inequalities that exist in the country and made them the topic of everyday conversation. Opinion polls agreed: the vast majority of the American people opposed the growing income and wealth gaps. They wanted politicians to do something about it. Nothing has been done, nor is anything likely to be done. I think the organizers of Occupy Wall Street would benefit from a reading of Saul Alinsky.

Barack Obama’s election lifted the hopes of millions that something might fundamentally change in Washington. When he ran, he was attacked as a radical Saul Alinsky community organizer. While he was a community organizer for three years, he abandoned that path to social change and chose an electoral one. Here’s what I wrote elsewhere shortly after his election:

What Obama does with the electoral organization that was put together for his campaign is separate from what people who want a small-d democratic agenda in the country must do. Obama’s agenda is a presidential one. Community organizing’s agenda should be to push the president. There will be plenty of people pushing him from Wall Street, the auto industry, and other elite circles. If there is not a countervailing push, organized independently of Obama, hopefully with his blessing, we will be disappointed in him as a president—and will have ourselves to blame.¹

By his second term, the disappointment with Obama was palpable. But it was also the case that there was no countervailing push, organized independently of him, to make him be better.

In his younger days, in a special issue of Illinois Issues titled After Alinsky, Obama wrote:

In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.²

This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues—jobs, education, crime, etc.

Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively—the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative. . . .

Organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to—it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.³

The idealistic supporters of Barack Obama who now bemoan his failures would benefit from a reading of Saul Alinsky. So, too, would the idealistic supporters of Hillary Clinton, who wrote a senior thesis on Alinsky and was asked by him to direct his new Proxies for People effort. She chose law school instead, deciding to be an insider rather than an outsider. The electoral path followed for her as well.

Saul Alinsky devoted his working life to teaching the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, the discriminated against, the working class, and toward the end of his life, the middle class, as well as those who generally cared about democracy and social and economic justice, how to realize their hopes and aspirations. He was an idealist who believed passionately in the capacity of everyday people to be self-governing. He was a small d democrat who knew that if people were to participate effectively in a democracy they had to have the latent power of their numbers brought forth and made manifest in effective people power organizations. He was a hardheaded realist who fully appreciated the maxim from abolitionist Frederick Douglass that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. He was a social inventor who developed and fine-tuned two instruments of people power—the broad-based community organization and the professional community organizer—that are as relevant today as when he and Joe Meegan organized the first of his mass-based organizations in 1939.

This book provides an introduction to Alinsky’s ideas and practices. It ranges from an analytic look at his core concepts to detailed stories about their implementation in a variety of contexts, and includes an introduction to some of the organizers who in one way or another implemented their understanding of what he had to teach.

Aaron Schutz and I raise critical questions about the work and thinking we present. But make no mistake: I think the people in these pages are American heroes and heroines, and the work they did and do has been vital to American democracy and the now-necessary fight to regain it. My own life is deeply indebted to three major connections—the early student movement at UC Berkeley, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights movement in the Deep South, and Alinsky—along with the work and thinking of many of the people who appear in these pages.

Alinsky has much to say to our current situation. By the end of this book, I hope you will agree.

Notes

1. Mike Miller, A Community Organizer’s Tale: People and Power in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2009).

2. The money Obama is talking about would come from membership dues, grants from relatively small foundations, and other contributions to finance an organization.

3. Barack Obama, Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City, Illinois Issues, September 1988, illinoisissues.uis.edu.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1

Editors’ Introduction

MIKE MILLER AND AARON SCHUTZ

In the pages that follow, we have assembled a range of articles, documents, organizational papers, and interviews about the tradition of community organizing that began with Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). From its origins in Chicago in the late 1930s, Alinsky’s approach spread across the country, increasingly diffusing into other parts of the world.

The book is structured around the work of five of his most important colleagues—Ed Chambers, Tom Gaudette, Dick Harmon, Fred Ross, and Nicholas von Hoffman—supplemented with speeches by leaders and documents from the organizations they built. We also include pieces by organizers who either worked directly with Alinsky or followed in his footsteps, and who, in ways we will discuss, diverged from his path. Together, these texts show how different organizers and leaders have adapted and elaborated Alinsky’s theory and practice in their work.

Many of these items appear in formal publication here for the first time; they were previously available only on untranscribed audiotapes or in early, mostly obsolete, and often difficult-to-read formats, such as mimeographed, dittoed, Thermo-Faxed, or Xeroxed pages. A few have remained well known among organizers, passing from hand to hand in flyspecked photocopies of photocopies. Others have mostly been forgotten. We drew some of them from university archives and the extensive collection of papers preserved by Miller during his long organizing career, and learned about others through citations in reference lists and discussions with other organizers. From a broad corpus of possibilities, we selected what we believe represent the best or most important examples of this shadow literature of organizing.

Mostly created by practitioners for audiences already deeply interested in the field, there is a directness to these texts—a vibrancy and sense of urgency often lacking in many of today’s more abstract or textbook-like introductions to organizing. As we explain in introductions to each section, because these documents were created for particular purposes at particular moments of history, many reflect the issues and circumstances of the time they were written and should be read with this in mind. We hope you find them as interesting as we have.

What Is Community Organizing?

In an interview with T. George Harris, Alinsky said, When people are organized, they move in . . . to the central decision-making tables. [They] say, ‘This is what we want. . . . We are people and damn it you are going to listen to us. . . .’ They are admitted to the decision-making tables . . . on the basis of power.¹

Community organizing brings powerless and relatively powerless people together in solidarity to defend and advance their interests and values. Through their organizations, they speak with people power to established power on matters that affect them in their daily lives. They speak on major issues that might affect tens of thousands (or even millions), and on small but important issues like a stop sign at a dangerous intersection.

Community organizing groups typically start by trying to negotiate with decision-makers who have the authority to make the changes they want: elected officials, private sector owners, executives and administrators in bureaucracies, and the like. Decision-makers, however, are used to making unilateral decisions. They feel accountable only to those who already have substantial influence, wealth, or power. They rarely need to respond to everyday people and their concerns. As a result, decision-makers often simply ignore the people’s requests to meet with them. Even when they do sit down, they generally try to defuse concerns without really listening or negotiating real change.

Action, at this point, inevitably involves conflict.

In fact, community organizing welcomes conflict as a tool to build people power. Only when adversaries recognize that there is power on the other side do they enter into real negotiations.

For example, tenants in a rat-infested, high-rent, no-services apartment building might organize themselves and seek changes from their landlord. When the landlord refuses to meet with them, they might start picketing him at a place where their presence will embarrass him, or engage in a rent-strike that will affect his profits. If they are wise in their choice of strategy and tactics, these actions will lead to substantial gains in their cause, reflected in an agreement that will recognize the tenant association as the collective voice for the tenants. Even after an agreement is reached, however, the tenants must stick together to prevent the landlord from backsliding, or evicting tenant leaders, or otherwise trying to ignore or undo what he has agreed to. This is why they need a long-term organization, not simply a momentary mobilization. Similar stories could be told about negotiations with plant managers, public administrators, politicians, corporate and financial executives, and others who hold the power to make decisions that affect people’s lives.

Community organizing is a thoroughly practical process. Organizations are successful only when they clearly identify their power in relationship to their potential adversaries. In the vernacular, they don’t pick fights they don’t have a chance of winning. Early on, when an organization’s membership is relatively small and it faces greater skepticism, it tackles smaller issues. Over time, small victories increase the competence and self-confidence of participants and help them recruit skeptics. The formula is simple: more people + more power = a growing capacity to address issues that are more deeply rooted in the status quo. Through organizing, communities that were marginalized, excluded, oppressed, and discriminated against increasingly gain the capacity to foster effective change.

In the most general sense, community organizing seeks to change the relations of power between existing institutions and the formerly powerless. Community organizers, including most of the writers of the essays included in this volume, build these community organizations. They identify leaders and potential leaders in communities and do their work through them.

In his short book Community Organizing: A Brief Introduction (Milwaukee, WI: Euclid Avenue Press, 2012), Mike Miller provides a detailed view of how institution-based community organizing was implemented in a small Presbyterian church that was a member of what he calls American City Community Organization (ACCO). The book presents a composite story of the development of this congregation and the larger organization of which it is a part. The portrayal of fictional organizer Jeanne Steuben carefully demonstrates what a community organizer working in this tradition does.

A Brief History of the Alinsky Tradition of Community Organizing

Alinsky’s first organizing project led to the creation of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in Chicago. He borrowed from the tough approach of the 1930s industrial union movement, grafting its strategy and tactics onto the poor, working-class Back of the Yards neighborhood next to Chicago’s vast industrial stockyards (an area infamously described in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle). Drawing on local traditions and values, Alinsky built community power on the strength of long-standing formal and informal social relationships. His organizations were rooted in existing institutions within these communities and built new associational life as the situation required.

As Alinsky noted in an interview many years later, Back of the Yards

was the nadir of all slums in America. People were crushed and demoralized, either jobless or getting starvation wages, diseased, living in filthy, rotting unheated shanties, with barely enough food and clothing to keep alive. And it was a cesspool of hate; the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the sentiment in spades. . . .

I knew that once they were provided with a real, positive program to change their miserable conditions, they wouldn’t need scapegoats anymore. Probably my prime consideration in moving into Back of the Yards, though, was because if it could be done there, it could be done anywhere.²

Whether this long-after-the-fact explanation really reflected what he was thinking at the time, the poverty and interethnic conflict he faced in this neighborhood are well established by historians.

The BYNC established the pattern for Alinsky’s subsequent organizing. Catholic parishes and the Packinghouse union were the BYNC’s most institutionalized anchors, but it also included every type of organization that Alinsky and his partner, Joe Meegan, could identify and draw in: block clubs, sororal and fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, athletic clubs, interest groups, merchants, and so on. And, where appropriate, new groups were formed. The goal was to get every group that had any real following among local people to be part of the organization—including groups that had previously believed they could never work together, like the Communist-led local union and the often-warring Catholic parishes that reflected the ethnic tensions of the neighborhood.

Without Meegan, the local Irish Catholic lay leader in Back of the Yards, Alinsky could not have proceeded. Meegan was widely respected and trusted in the neighborhood; he credentialed Alinsky. But after the creation of the BYNC, its co-organizers took different paths. Meegan became the director of the BYNC. The BYNC became his life’s work, and persists today—albeit with a great deal of controversy surrounding it (to Alinsky’s disappointment and frustration, its later efforts included the goal of keeping African Americans out of the neighborhood—an issue we address elsewhere).

Alinsky, in contrast with Meegan, saw the possibility for a larger agenda. With support from high-level Catholic clergy, key people in the industrial union movement (specifically in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO)—and the wealthy department store owner Marshall Field III, he started the IAF. Under its umbrella, and with the legitimacy his supporters provided, Alinsky sought to spread this work across the Midwest, particularly in places with sympathetic bishops and strong locals of the Packinghouse Workers union.

World War II brought an abrupt halt to Alinsky’s local organizing, and he joined the Roosevelt administration to provide productivity assistance in wartime industries. At the end of the war, Alinsky resumed his work, but soon had to contend with the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Divided by anti-Communism and increasingly co-opted by a relatively narrow collective bargaining and political agenda, labor’s support for Alinsky’s work withered.

Catholic support grew, however, especially where there were bishops in the tradition of Catholicism’s social encyclicals, which said the church should engage the world on behalf of social and economic justice, and in the National Conference of Catholic Charities, a service and action arm of the national church. Soon joining the Catholics, particularly in previously white but now African American communities, were mainline Protestant churches with an institutional interest in dealing with the problems posed by largely vacant church buildings, and a new breed of inner-city pastors with a moral commitment to racial and economic justice. These Protestant churches sought ways to translate the sometimes conflicting social gospel and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr’s approach to social justice (Protestantism’s equivalents to the Catholic social encyclicals) to the problems of the ghetto. Catholic and Protestant leaders spread the word about Alinsky through their official church bodies, which mostly responded favorably when local church leaders decided they wanted Alinsky to organize in their communities.

Nicholas von Hoffman

Among the most imaginative of Alinsky’s early lead organizers was Nicholas von Hoffman, whose work with African Americans on Chicago’s South Side led to The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), returning Alinsky to national prominence in the 1960s. For the most part, the core of the IAF’s work in the early post–World War II days had been in white ethnic, working-class neighborhoods. The impact of the Deep South Freedom Riders on TWO led von Hoffman and Alinsky to conclude that they were in a rare moment in history when a social movement moves significant numbers of people into action. They hoped to draw on this energy in more movement-like actions while still working to build durable local power organizations. TWO’s slogan was self-determination through community power. As Minister Franklin Florence, an African American leader of the IAF’s later effort in Rochester, New York, said of his group, "When you say ‘black power,’ in Rochester, you spell it ‘F.I.G.H.T.’ (Freedom, Integration [later Integrity], Goals, Honor, Today).³

Fred Ross

Somewhat separately from all this, Alinsky heard about Fred Ross just after World War II. Louis Wirth, one of Alinsky’s University of Chicago sociologist poker-playing partners, complained that Ross was supposed to be doing research but was always getting distracted by social action. Alinsky’s ears perked up. After further checking, he offered to take Ross off his friend’s hands. Ross’s engagement with poverty went back to the 1930s; in fact, Ross had worked in the Farm Security Administration camp depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. There he had developed a democratic tenant body, and the farmworkers had used lessons from their experiences governing a camp to deal with local politicians and growers.

After the war, working with Mexican Americans, Ross developed an organizing methodology that used informal house meetings as the key building block for chapters in what became the statewide Community Service Organization (CSO). Ross, and later other organizers, identified informal leaders or potential leaders whom they would meet with one on one and ask to host house meetings. By agreeing to be hosts, these people agreed to get their people to attend. Thus, the house meeting tested whether someone could deliver. After a critical mass of house meetings demonstrated local interest, an area-wide meeting would give birth to a CSO chapter.

The CSO became a powerhouse organization for Mexican Americans in California. For example, it was largely responsible for the election of the state’s first Mexican American member of the U.S. Congress—Ed Roybal—and it was the frontline fighter in battles against urban renewal, job discrimination, police harassment and brutality, and other problems.

The individual membership approach to building CSO chapters contrasted with the organization of organizations approach of Alinsky’s BYNC, in which organizations were the formal members, though in both cases the organization was built around local leadership. In the CSO, individuals joined geographically-based (town or urban neighborhood) chapters, and the chapters were members of the statewide organization. To create an institutional anchor, CSO chapters typically established service centers, which offered an array of services to members and the larger community.

Ross involved people like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Gil Padilla in the CSO, where they became leaders and then full-time organizers. In the early 1960s, they became key organizers, joined by Ross, in a newly forming farmworker organization initiated by Chavez in the area around Delano, California, which eventually became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).

Ross’s vision represents a different strand of the Alinsky tradition. And Ross’s individual membership strategy remained influential in the years to come. It informed a range of important efforts, from Cesar Chavez’s farmworker organizing to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), formed by Wade Rathke in 1970. And Ross’s boycott operation was the school for many organizers who went into both labor and other community organizing work.

Tom Gaudette

Tom Gaudette was famously needled by Alinsky in 1961 into quitting his position of vice-president at Admiral Corporation to become an organizer. He worked with Alinsky on a number of projects before striking out on his own. Gaudette’s own work focused on neighborhood organizing with congregations and other neighborhood institutions, but he did not focus on the internal life of the churches themselves to the extent that the later IAF would. He mentored Shel Trapp, who developed an approach to block club organizing, and who, along with the leader Gale Cincotta, created National People’s Action (NPA) and its training arm, the National Training and Information Center (NTIC), which won major changes in national housing laws, among many others. Gaudette also trained Fr. John Baumann and Fr. Jerry Helfridge, who created what became People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO) when they went to California.

The Birth of the Institute and the Challenges of the 1960s

One problem with Alinsky’s approach to building organizations of organizations was that he didn’t have enough skilled organizers to respond to the demand for them. This demand rose sharply as the civil rights movement exploded in the North and the visibility of The Woodlawn Organization grew nationally.

In the early days of the IAF, Alinsky would find creative and talented people who were already at work in poor communities and seeking to address powerlessness and the social and economic justice issues. He would develop a one-on-one relationship with them, engaging in conversations about organizing and sharing anecdotes drawn mostly from his study of the CIO and his Back of the Yards experiences. When Alinsky thought someone had the talent to put together a mass-based organization, he would try to recruit him.

(Mike Miller was recruited by Alinsky in this way. Alinsky and Miller met in 1961. A tutorial relationship developed between them in San Francisco airport meetings; in Miller’s visits to Alinsky’s summer home in Carmel, California; and in the rides Miller gave Alinsky to the San Francisco airport. Alinsky would tell Miller organizing stories, using them to illustrate principles, and then ask Miller questions to learn his responses. In 1966, Alinsky hired Miller to direct his Kansas City, Missouri, project.)

Once recruited, the organizer immediately began work in the field. He was required to file regular tape-recorded or written reports, which Alinsky would review and comment on. It was an informal approach to recruitment and training, but Alinsky’s initial conversations and subsequent commentaries on reports were filled with insights about how people and power worked. Alinsky also began conducting ten-day workshops around the country, typically sponsored by religious bodies that had given their blessing to his work. Attended primarily by clergy and potential organizers, these were a precursor to the formal workshops later offered by all the organizing networks.

This one-on-one approach was limited in the number of new organizers it could develop. By the mid-1960s, Alinsky was under pressure from his religious supporters to start a more formal organizer training institute. With the support of Midas Muffler heir Gordon Sherman, Alinsky’s training center opened in Chicago in 1968. Thus began a new era in the Alinsky tradition.

The emergence of the organizing institute, however, came at the same time as a confluence of other complicating factors for Alinsky’s organizing. The black power movement pushed back against the idea that a white man could be an agent of black liberation. The federal government’s War on Poverty and a proliferation of foundation-funded community-based nonprofits increasingly co-opted and tamped down the conflict created by organizing groups and other social movements of the time. And Alinsky was becoming increasingly concerned about what was happening to two major white constituencies. He saw the white ethnics (Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, and others), with whom his organizing work had begun, drifting to the political right (he called them the have-a-little-want-mores). At the same time, he worried that the liberals and moderates in the suburban churches who had been supporting organizing in minority poor neighborhoods were becoming alienated by the militant rhetoric of many organizations in these communities. They were themselves experiencing powerlessness as they dealt with more-and-more distant and bureaucratized institutions and saw the war in Vietnam continue.

In an effort to connect with young organizers emerging from student movement organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Northern Student Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society, Alinsky hired Staughton Lynd. Lynd had codirected the Mississippi Freedom Schools, a major civil rights effort in 1964 that had been organized by the SNCC (nicknamed snick). Lynd joined two veteran Alinsky organizers, Ed Chambers and Dick Harmon, as the core personnel for the Institute.

The connection was a tenuous one from the outset, however. A number of criticisms were emerging from the New Left regarding Alinsky and his approach. They weren’t all new. Some of the same criticisms had come previously from some in the Old Left and from some liberals. Some Old Left radicals complained that Alinsky didn’t identify capitalism as the core source of injustices in the world. They also thought he was too antagonistic to electoral politics. Depending on the source, Alinsky’s political problem was either his failure to speak out for a third party or his unwillingness to endorse the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils. From the perspective of some liberals, in contrast, Alinsky’s emphases on self-interest, conflict tactics, and people power were unnerving. These liberals favored discussion, reason, and an appeal to altruism or at least a more enlightened notion of self-interest. Alinsky’s New Left critics thought him too pragmatically focused on power; they wanted a broader moral and analytic critique of American power from him. They also saw his approaches to leadership as too hierarchical, both within the IAF and in the pattern of organization he developed within communities.

Alinsky was usually dismissive of these critics. Let them get their hands dirty in the actualities of organizing, he generally said, and then we’ll have a discussion. At the same time, however, he did present nuanced responses to all these critics on occasions when he thought it appropriate. We will explore these responses as we dig deeper into his thinking and work.

Proxies for People

Alinsky participated in some of the seminars of the newly established organizer training institute, but his interest had largely shifted to a new effort he called Proxies for People. He proposed that churches and others give the votes attached to their retirement fund stock portfolios to a new organization that Alinsky would start. With proxies in hand, the organization would begin to make the modern corporation accountable to its communities and workers in addition to major shareholders.

Alinsky had no illusions about the concentration of ownership and control in the modern corporation. But as he said when he used proxies to bring Eastman Kodak to the negotiating table in Rochester, New York, he did think that proxies could provide leverage for antitrust and other political action.⁴ The combination of direct action (aimed at the corporation and its key personnel) with political action (aimed at breaking up concentrated economic power) would have been the key to his approach, but this notion of combining these two thrusts was largely lost to later users of the proxy vote tactic, in part because in 1972, before this project could be launched, Saul Alinsky quite unexpectedly keeled over and died of a heart attack.

A New Face and New Emphases

Under Ed Chambers’s direction, the organizing institute began, with missteps and experimentation, to institutionalize community organizing. As the hip-pocket operation that was Alinsky’s IAF expanded, the new IAF formalized the relationship of both local organizations and organizers to it so that all three stayed connected over time. From this came the idea of organizing networks. There are now six national networks—the IAF, People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), the Direct Action and Research Training Center (DART), the Gamaliel Foundation, National People’s Action (NPA), and USAction. Training organizations like Midwest Academy and a number of regional organizations (some representing the reconstitution of ACORN) are also at least partially legacies of Alinsky’s original work. There are independent local efforts and regional networks as well. There is also a continuing, though in many cases sadly diminishing, commitment from much of American mainline Protestantism, the Catholic Church, major Jewish institutions, and other religious leaders to Alinsky-tradition community organizing. And one can find a growing presence of his thinking and work throughout the world.

An Alinsky adage was that the vital life span of one of these community organizations was five years. After that point, he believed, it would either decline and die or, in most cases, become simply another co-opted organization. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the IAF added important new dimensions to community organizing, including Ernesto Cortes Jr.’s revival of San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Progress and Services (COPS). The organizers who inherited the IAF introduced major new thinking into the Alinsky approach.

The new IAF vision focused more attention on the internal dynamics and renewal of the congregations IAF was working with. If the organizations that made up a community organizing group were not strong, then the organizing group itself would be weak as well. Further, congregations were vital to restoring an autonomous civil society, separate from political, government, and economic institutions. This approach worked to codify, more than Alinsky had been willing to, the intersections between organizing and Judeo-Christian language and visions, as well as the IAF’s overall approach to organizing. For unions or other civil society institutions willing to find parallels, this new approach was applied to them and their traditions and language.

The new thinking was consistent with Alinsky’s notion that organizing had to respond continuously to new conditions. The focus on congregational renewal, especially, was driven by several important changes in churches and society that created conditions quite different from those in which Alinsky had developed the BYNC:

▪ The reforms prompted by Vatican II in the Catholic Church changed relationships among laity, clergy, and its hierarchy, sometimes disrupting the infrastructure of parishes. There was parallel erosion in the internal life of mainline Protestant churches.

▪ The federal War on Poverty, private foundations, and other external groups poured money into minority communities, creating what Alinsky called welfare colonialism.⁵ As we noted above, these resources supported the emergence of what some have called a community-based nonprofit industry complex in impoverished areas.⁶ These new nonprofits increasingly crowded out the more autonomous civic associations prominent during Alinsky’s BYNC years. While specific programs may have contributed to alleviating poverty and other positive goals, they also had the negative effect of undermining independent civic associational life.⁷

▪ The erosion of civil society by mass media, an expanding culture of consumerism, dramatic shifts in the economy, and other forces deepened alienation in large sectors of American society.

Most of the other networks picked up on these ideas, modifying or elaborating them according to their own experience and understanding, and followed in the direction taken by the IAF.

Ross and the Organizing Individuals Approach

During this time, Ross went his own way, developing a nationally important cadre of organizers when he teamed with Cesar Chavez to organize farmworkers, and creating a national boycott organization that was essential to their initial successes. The farm worker boycott used Ross’s house-meeting approach to build farmworker support organizations in every major metropolitan area of the country. There was a key difference between the boycott approach and the CSO, however. The boycott organizations sought to support the farmworkers’ union effort in California and did not attempt to develop local people power vehicles that could address multiple local interests. Ross’s trainees and subsequent generations of organizers trained by them now are present in numerous union organizing departments and hold leadership and staff positions in a range of labor organizations. Still others work in a wide variety of advocacy and other community organizations. Boycott training, however, prepared organizers to be mobilizers rather than organizers—a distinction we will later elaborate.

After Alinsky

What we do here is provide key texts from the early years of what is now among the most promising approaches to social change in the country and world—whatever the differences among its practitioners, and whatever their limitations.

Amoeba-like, organizing has spread. If we attempted to describe it we would run the risk of a series of begats, as in the Bible stories of who begat whom. In fact, the intersecting influences are too complex and individual to describe without elaborate detail. In a more general sense, the begats in these pages take form in the writings and ideas of Ernesto Cortes, Arnie Graf, Dolores Huerta, Shel Trapp, Heather Booth, Wade Rathke, and an array of lesser-known organizers, as well as in the documents from the organizations in which they worked.

Learning the Craft

Organizers learn the craft of organizing on the job. As the tradition advances, journeymen and journeywomen organizers recruit and mentor new organizers. Because we do not believe you can learn organizing from books, for those new to organizing this volume is meant as an incitement—not just to go out and organize, but to find a good mentor from whom you can learn the work. In the case of experienced organizers, we hope that these pages will challenge established ways of thinking, provide new ways of understanding old truths, and spark ideas for moving forward into an always uncertain future.

It is important to stress, however, that more than journeyperson work is involved in becoming an effective organizer. Creating or remaking an organizing group is not like opening a new franchise of McDonald’s. Given the complexity of human cultures, the unique history of particular communities, and differences among regions and individual human beings, one cannot simply replicate a static model from one location to another, or one time to another. Organizers are also architects, or even painters, working with a human drawing board or canvass. In an organizing project, a skilled organizer—sometimes working with a small group of committed others, sometimes in the recesses of his or her imagination—designs and redesigns the scope and method of the project. Intuition and knowledge about the history, character, culture, politics, and social patterns of the people involved all come into play as an organizer thinks about what is to be built.

Appreciating the Craft

This is also a book for members of the general public who are concerned about the present drift to the right in the political world, the continuing growth of consumer culture, the concentration of wealth and power among an ever-smaller number of people in the world, the erosion of a vital and independent civil society, and the general growth of poverty and powerlessness, especially in the United States.

Barack Obama put community organizing on the lips of millions who had never heard of it. That was both a service and disservice to the work. It is good that it be known. It is not good that so few people understand what the organizing is and are told (mostly incorrectly) that Obama’s electoral apparatus embodies it.

Organizing and Writing

Alinsky often denigrated academics and traditional scholars. The word ‘academic,’ he wrote, is a synonym for irrelevant.⁸ In an interview, he complained about all the horse manure the scholars he knew were handing out about poverty and slums.⁹ It is important to understand, however, that he actually came to organizing equipped with the best academic training available at the time. In graduate school at the University of Chicago he worked with the most brilliant scholars of urban poverty in the nation, conducting ethnographic studies of youth gangs, the Capone gang, the justice system, and more. He even wrote articles for academic journals. In Back of the Yards, his vision of community organizing emerged out of a synthesis of an eclectic academic background, key components of the social theory developed by the Chicago School of sociology, his extensive practical experience working in poor communities, and the strategies and tactics of union organizers. He did not hold in contempt all scholarship, then—just most of it. He hated bad scholarship—that is, scholarship that was not rooted in the realities of the people it purported to understand and describe, and glossed over the misery and the despair.¹⁰ In the ten-day workshops on organizing he led, mostly for clergy and potential organizer recruits, an extensive reading list—with the books on sale at a back table—was among the handouts, with some of the readings required of attendees.

In fact, Alinsky himself often breezily quoted from Heraclites, Plato, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, and others, and certainly from the Bible—both Old and New Testaments. Reading widely across philosophy, theology, political science, sociology, and other areas, he drew on the best for his training workshops and books. He ran reading groups with local priests and encouraged those he worked with to read broadly as well. One early Alinsky organizer, Lester Hunt, fondly remembers weekly book discussions at a local restaurant where he, Alinsky, and von Hoffman grappled with writings ranging from the sociology of Wirth to the Bible, to Thucydides’s Greek histories, to Alice in Wonderland, and tried to relate them to organizing.¹¹ In addition to founding a tradition of community organizing, then, Alinsky modeled a particular kind of thinker and actor—someone who was continuously learning from the world and from what the best writers of his time (and before) could tell him.

Always evaluate after you act, he told organizers. You, young man, he accused an unreflective activist of the 1960s, are a pile of undigested actions.¹² It is no surprise, then, that the best of the organizers who came after him kept writing and thinking as they were acting. What did we learn? How can we do this better? What are we missing, here? In the pages that follow, you will find some of the best organizers of a generation engaged in this creative work, exploring what organizing can and should mean for their time.

Uncertainty and Practice

The best writing in a particular tradition often comes at the beginning, or during moments of change and uncertainty. After the initial aspects of any vision are developed, the thinking that follows has a tendency to become procedural; it often degrades into a kind of dogmatism. This is the way we do things, many organizing manuals say. Those coming after a pathbreaking thinker generally try to clarify what the master was really trying to say, summarizing things down into neat concepts and diagrams. And, in fact, it makes sense that this will happen. Okay, practitioners often say, all that complexity may be interesting, but I need to know what to do on Monday morning.

Alinsky himself struggled against this kind of simplification—against efforts to collapse the challenges of organizing down into some simple model or set of tips and tricks. In his second organizing book, Rules for Radicals, he included fewer actual examples because he had found that organizers would run into a problem and, instead of coming up with their own solution by responding to the particular demands of their own unique situation, they would riffle through the pages of Reveille for Radicals and look for one of Alinsky’s tricks. He probably shouldn’t have bothered—some might say that this second guide suffers in comparison to the first, lacking some of the vitality of Reveille’s stories. The simplification came anyway. Perhaps it is inevitable.

In a recent book reminiscing about his time with Alinsky, von Hoffman complains about this tendency toward dogma in organizing. In a discussion about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, von Hoffman writes that Saul’s understanding of the community organizing business was almost as nebulous as Palin’s. For Saul organizing varied in method, shape and scope depending on the times and the circumstances.¹³ Speaking of today’s standard model of community organizing, von Hoffman says, I doubt that Alinsky would have much use for it in the changed society we live in. The least doctrinaire of men, he would in all likelihood be tinkering with new ways to realize the old goal of democratic self-rule.¹⁴

White Men

The Alinsky organizing tradition of the period covered by this book has been critiqued for the dominance of white men. To some extent this is simply a fact of history—Alinsky didn’t hire women, and all the major organizers he hired were white. As we note in the section on Heather Booth, the attitudes of Alinsky and some of his lieutenants toward women were sexist. This began to change in the 1970s, however, and by the 1980s the number of women organizers was rising rapidly. The issue with respect to organizers and leaders of color is somewhat more nuanced. Alinsky’s groups did hire key organizers of color, most notably Squire Lance, Bob Squires, and Leon Finney at TWO. More importantly, as Alinsky was drawn into African American neighborhoods, African Americans became major leaders of his organizations. These included important figures like Minister Florence of FIGHT and Rev. Arthur Brazier of TWO. In fact, Alinsky seriously considered supporting Brazier in a run for Congress. Further, Alinsky sought partnerships with black-led organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. However, they didn’t come into being.

This book reflects the reality of the tradition during this period. At the same time, however, we include the work of influential leaders of color and that of prominent women leaders and organizers like Cincotta and Huerta. We also discuss the efforts of Booth to make organizing a more productive and welcoming space for women.

A Brief Overview of the Book

The sections of this book each contain chapters related to a particular organizer or historical moment in organizing. Overall, we seek to present this tradition of organizing as an ongoing dialogue and debate.

This introductory chapter is followed by a chapter on the core concepts of organizing in the Alinsky tradition. Also included in this first part is an overview essay, What Is an Organizer? (1973) by Richard Rothstein. Part II starts by introducing Nicholas von Hoffman, one of Alinsky’s early colleagues and a close friend for the rest of his life. Von Hoffman played a central role in creating one of Alinsky’s most important organizations, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO); we devote a chapter to TWO, including excerpts from documents and statements by key TWO leaders. This is followed by an edited version of a memo written mostly by von Hoffman and Hunt, providing a series of answers (1959) to a group of religious leaders who were questioning the IAF approach. The section ends with a classic essay by von Hoffman, Finding and Making Leaders (1963), which is still read by organizers today. In this text, von